Satan

Satan is the adversary of the god of Abraham [AG].
Thus, Satan is evil personified. Many followers of the Bible consider Satan
to be a real being, a spirit created by AG. Satan and the other spirits who
followed him rebelled against AG. They were allegedly cast out from Heaven
by their creator. Theologians might speculate as to why the almighty did not
annihilate the "fallen angels," as he is said to have done to his other
creations when they failed to be righteous (save Noah and his
family, of course). Satan was allowed to set up his own kingdom in Hell and to send out
devils to prowl the earth for converts. The demonic world seems to have been allowed to
exist for one purpose only: to tempt humans to turn away from AG. Why AG would allow
Satan to do this is explained in the Book of Job, where Satan is
described as an angel who works in cahoots with AG. When Job asks why AG let Satan
torment him the answer is blunt and final: Hath thou an arm like the Lord? The
story of Job is interpreted in many different ways by theologians but my interpretation is
that nobody knows why AG lets Satan live and torment us. AG is AG and can do whatever
he wants. Ours is not to question why, ours is but to do and die.

Satan, being a spirit, is neither male nor female. However, like his creator, Satan is
usually referred to as a masculine being. Many believe that Satan, or the Devil as he is
often called, can "possess" human beings. Possessionis bodily invasion
by the devil. The Catholic Church still performs exorcisms on
those considered to be possessed. Jesus is said to have cast out demons, i.e., performed
exorcisms, and the Church considers itself to have been given this same power by Jesus.
Throughout the centuries, many pious religious people have erroneously considered those with certain
mental or physical illnesses to be possessed by Satan.

More frequent than outright possession, however, has been the accusation of being in
consort with the devil. Satan is believed to have many powers, among them the power to
manifest himself in human or animal form. The consorting has been recorded as often being
purely physical and mostly sexual. For most of the history of Christianity there are
reports of Satan having sex with humans, either as an
incubus (male devil) or
succubus
(female devil). Witches and sorcerers
were thought by many to be the offspring of such unions. They are considered especially
pernicious because they inherit some of the devil's powers.

According to Carl Sagan, accounts of diabolical intercourse are common cultural
phenomena:

However, as a child being instructed in the ways of Satan by Dominican sisters, stories
of nuns being raped by incubi in a priest's clothing were assuredly not told. The Devil
was there to tempt us to sin, pure and simple. He was not there to have sex with us or
engage in reproductive experimentation or breed a race of witches and magi. To be sure,
his main temptations would be sexual. There was no doubt that He spent a lot of time using
girls to tempt boys into impure thoughts and deeds. He would invade our minds continuously
during adolescence, planting desires for sexual experiences too evil to be mentioned much
less performed. I suppose, to be fair, the girls should have been taught to be wary of
boys trying to get them to yield to sexual temptation and that we would use every trick in
the devil's arsenal to get them to go "all the way." But the girls were taught
that they were the temptresses and were therefore the ones who needed to keep from
harming the boys with their female charms. We were taught to pray constantly, implore the
intercession of the saints and the holy mother of AG, that they might give us protection
against the snares of Satan. It must have occurred to many observers that the fear of
Satan seems very much like fear of our own sexuality.

innocent angels

For all the instruction we were given on the Evil One, I don't remember ever being
taught about Pope Innocent VIII and his persecution of witches and heretics. The Pope
proclaimed in a Bull that "evil angels," i.e., devils, were having sex with many
human men and women. He was not the first to have made this claim. Others before him, such
as Thomas Aquinas, had explored this territory in great detail. Thomas reminds us that
since the devil is not human, he can't produce human seed. So, he must transform himself
into a woman, seduce a man, keep the seed, transform into a male, seduce a woman and
transfer the seed. Something of the devil is captured by the seed along the way, so the
offspring are not normal. Apparently it took Satan a long time to figure out that if he
wanted to control the world, the best way to do it would be to breed with humans. Invading
our bodies would be more efficient and effective than trying to invade our minds. But the
Pope and many other pious men had a plan to exterminate the diabolical offspring: they
would torture and burn them all! They would fight fire with fire! The Devil would not
outdo them. In fact, the sadistic and monstrous behavior of the holy and pious inquisitors
is almost enough to make a skeptic believe in Satan. The inquisitors were nothing short of
diabolical.

One of the more interesting aspects of Satanology is the recurring theme of humans
making a pact with the devil. The Faust legend is the best-known of these: in
exchange for one's soul, Satan will bestow one with wealth or power for a specified time.
In most versions of the story, Faust tricks the devil and avoids payment. In the original,
the devil mutilates and kills Faust at the end of the contract. His brains are splattered
on the walls of his room, his eyes and teeth lie on the floor and his corpse rests outside
on a dunghill (Smith, 269).

Today, there are still those who believe Satan is a real being, but we hear few stories
of incubi and succubi any more. The closest thing we have to such stories are alien abduction accounts and star children.
Fortunately, for today's alien abduction victims with similar tales of sexual
experimentation--the devil being replaced with aliens from outer space--there is no
equivalent to the medieval Church to persecute, torture, or exterminate them.

It is interesting, though, that most of these murderers and torturers feel some need to
at least appear as if they are doing good while they commit their horrors. What drives the
terrorist or ethnic cleanser today to their abominations, or the witch hunters to their
destruction of families, seems to be the same forces that drove the pious enforcers of the
Inquisitions. Their
behavior is almost enough to make a skeptic think that maybe Satan does exist--in the
souls of these good people fighting for their noble causes.

From a philosophical perspective, the universal belief in evil demons is based on the
need for an explanation of the enormous quantity of moral and physical evil pervading
human existence for our entire history. I suppose, too, that devils in some way serve to
excuse our own evil actions and mitigate our sense of responsibility for the harm we do.
Psychologically, demons may well be a projection of ourselves, the worst part of our
nature or the most feared part of our own nature. From a literary perspective, demons must
exist. If they didn't, we'd have to invent them. They seem essential to so much of our
storytelling--more essential, perhaps, than their goodly counterparts.

the waning of Satan's power

As the power of the Christian Church has waned, so too has the power of Satan. It is no
accident that Satan reached the peak of his career at the same time the Church did, during
the thirteenth century. During the Middle Ages, the Devil was said to have built Hadrian's
wall between Scotland and England, moved huge stones to construct megalithic stone circles
and dolmens, built bridges such as that at Saint-Cloud and the Pont de Valentre at Cahors,
for the price of the soul of the first one who crossed the bridge, etc. Satan could
perform magic, but it must be remembered that the Christian religion is basically a
religion of magic, of sacraments which protect one from Satan and which change bread and
wine into Christ, of miracles which contravene the natural order for good or ill, of
resurrection from the dead and of the promise of eternal life. Satan represents the
obverse of that order: black magic, pacts with the devil, wonders done contravening the
natural order, the promise of eternal youth and wondrous powers. The Satanic Order was the
creation of the Church, necessary to establish its own power over the world. Heretics,
witches and sorcerers were a threat to the world dominion of the Church. They had to be
eradicated. As the enemies of the Church grew more numerous and more powerful, so did the
reign of terror grow and so did the power of the Church get established more and more
firmly.

As the power of Christianity waned as the dominant social and political force in
western culture, so too did the power of Satan. By the eighteenth century, in Europe at
least, witch and heretic burnings had all but ceased. Today, most of us in the Christian
world would consider it primitive and barbaric to suggest that anyone be hounded or killed
for communing with Satan. Even those who are allegedly doing evil in the name of Satan are
usually pursued for the evil they do, not for their alleged association with the devil. It
is likely that most police officers, if they had to deal with crimes committed by Satan
worshippers, would view the criminals as deluded rather than as really communing with
otherworldly beings.

If the rise of modern science had anything to do with the fall of the Christian Church
from its position of supreme influence in western culture, then modern science can take
partial credit for the exorcism of Satan from western consciousness. Of course, the Devil
is not dead yet but he gets his power from AG, and as AG's power wanes so does Satan's.
Someday, perhaps, both AG and Satan will become impotent strangers to the human
imagination. But don't count on it. Many theists today believe that the evils of today's
world, and they are many as we all know, are due to the rise of Satan and the decrease of
religious influence. If they had their way, we would all be praying more and working
against the snares of the devil. I, however, think we have more to
fear from these pious people than we do from the Devil or his admirers. Some might even go
so far as to identify these pious advocates of constitutional amendments for prayer in
schools as devils in disguise. I don't think so, though when you have AG's children
murdering people at abortion clinics, there really doesn't seem to be much need for Satan.
In fact, if Satan and his crew returned to earth they'd find that all the good jobs for
devils have been taken by the pious of the Earth.

Finally, there are the modern day Satanists who find solace and power in occult magick, but especially in anything anti-Christian. They draw their
inspiration from the great works of imagination in art, literature, and policy created
primarily by pious Christians in their zealous wars against their enemies, but also
created by pre-Christian cults such as the Egyptian cult of Set or by non-Christian
occultists such as Aleister Crowley and Anton LaVey. Today's
Satanists have been blamed by pious Christians for ritual murders
of children, mutilation and sacrificial killings of animals, writing backwards messages on musical recordings instructing people to
kill, sending subliminal or secret messages through
diabolical symbols on pizza boxes or soap wrappers, causing the general decay of morals
and civilization as we know it, etc. The Satanists deny it. The evidence is not very
strong that the Satanists are either as evil or as powerful as their enemies say they are.
There is strong evidence for the strength and wickedness of the pious. Witness their
witch-hunts in recent years against child care workers and parents and relatives of
children. The evidence is strong that the pious have frequently and unjustly accused many
of satanic ritual abuse of children. And they have been aided
in the witch-hunt by devoted therapists and pious police and prosecutors.

Church blames Devil-inspired children over sex abuse The abusers see
themselves as the victims and everything that has happened, up to and
including the Murphy
report, is part of the attack that these Devil-inspired, tempter
children have been responsible for in their attempts to destroy the church.

Pat
Robertson's Satanic Sermon Against Haiti Pat Robertson says last
Tuesday’s devastating 7.0 earthquake, in Haiti, was the result of a “curse”
because Haitians “made a pact to the Devil,” to free themselves from their
former French slave-masters centuries ago.